DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH FALL 2020 GRADUATE COURSE OFFERINGS NOTE: With one exception (ENG 615B), all courses below are currently scheduled to be taught face-to-face. Should any be converted to online or hybrid mode, we will distribute revised descriptions. 700-LEVEL SEMINARS 700 • Bibliography & Methods • Tu 4:00–6:45 • Emily Setina This course will serve as an introduction to graduate work in English. We will survey different fields in the profession along with prevalent methodologies, and we will discuss the current characteristics of graduate studies in the humanities. We will also cover various genres of graduate student writing, such as the annotated bibliography, the book review, the conference paper, the journal article, and the scholarly monograph. Students should develop a deeper familiarity with the range of available scholarly techniques and professional approaches to literary criticism. Fulfills an MA requirement & may serve as an elective for MFA and PhD students. 705 • Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction • Tu 4:00-6:45 • Maile Chapman ENG 705 is a fiction workshop designed for graduate students in the MFA program in creative writing. The workshop experience will sharpen your close reading skills; refine your ability to respond critically to creative work verbally and in writing; and expose you to other perspectives on your own work. Each member of the workshop will submit two stories or excerpts from a longer manuscript for which revision is intended, with the possibility of more opportunities as the schedule allows. We will discuss these submissions in class, along with essays on craft topics as needed. This course is graded on a Satisfactory/Fail basis. Fulfills MA & PhD with Creative Dissertation requirements. 705 • Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry • M 4:00-6:45 • Claudia Keelan PASTORAL-LANDSCAPE-ECOPOETRYThis semester in 705, we’ll study the progression of the pastoral convention to what is known as ecopoetry today. Texts will include Virgil’s Eclogues, British Landscape Poetry, HD Thoreau’s journals, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” William’s Paterson, Lorine Niedecker’s Selected Poetry, selections from Adrienne Rich’s poetry, Cole Swensen’s Park, and others. Fulfills MA & PhD with Creative Dissertation requirements. 705 • Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction • W 4:00-6:45 • David Morris Fulfills MA & PhD with Creative Dissertation requirements. 714 • Studies in Rhetoric & Composition: Rhetoric(s) of American Feminism(s) • MW 1:00-2:15 • Melissa Carrion Adopting a rhetorical lens is about more than identifying appeals to pathos, logos, and ethos. It’s also about recognizing and tracing the (often recurring) arguments and commonplaces that circulate within public discourse, and analyzing how those arguments/commonplaces are derived, deployed, and at times coopted for strategic purposes. This course investigates this process in the context of 4.23.20 1 American feminism(s), exploring the rhetoric adopted by activists in three “waves” of feminism: the 19thCentury women’s movement, the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, and the “third wave” of feminism which began in the late 20th century and continues today*. To these ends, we will read primary texts (including documents and speeches) produced by feminist activists and scholars alongside work by rhetorical theorists (who can offer us a framework and vocabulary for examining these texts). In addition to class participation, discussion, and reading responses, students will write an academic book review, produce a polished research paper/rhetorical analysis/creative project which can be submitted to an academic conference and/or for publication, and design/deliver a formal presentation based on their project. *Depending on who you read, we are currently in the midst of a “fourth wave.” We will also grapple with this label and distinction . Required Texts: Man Cannot Speak for Her (Volume 2), Ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, Ed. Barbara A. Crow Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), Eds. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald Bad Feminist: Essays, Roxane Gay **Additional articles/readings that students can access for free online or through the UNLV library 722 • Studies in Chaucer • M 4:00-6:45 • John Bowers This graduate seminar will survey the major works by the fourteenth-century author Geoffrey Chaucer – “the father of English literature” – from his early dream-poems such as Book of the Duchess through his tragic masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde to his comic classic The Canterbury Tales. We will discover that the late-medieval author was already engaged with issues of gender, sexuality, class, race, canonic genres, and national identities. The only textbook is the paperback Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry Benson. The grading formula consists of a Midterm Test (30%), an In-Class Report on Criticism (10%), an 8-10 Page Paper critiquing articles published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (30%), and a Final Examination (30%). Fulfills the MA pre-1800 requirement. 729 • Forms of Fiction • Th 4:00-6:45 • Doug Unger This seminar is designed primarily for creative writers but is open to all graduate students. We will read exemplary first novels by contemporary American writers Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, and Susan Choi, followed by a “masterpiece” or prize-winning major work later in their careers (so required reading will be 10 books). We will examine style, concept, and authority, our primary emphasis on writing techniques as well as varying critical approaches to these writers and their works. We will also attempt to answer questions about matters of origin―from what source, or how in the life and/or artistic development of these writers, was the first novel written? What are the authorial intentions? How is the first novel structured perhaps differently (or similarly) to the later masterpiece? How might we approach each writer’s developing authority? Required writing assignments will be at least five fairly brief (4-5 pages) “imitations” of a stylistic innovation, character reading, structural invention or technique we discover in our readings; OR five (3-5 page) annotations (short essays); OR two substantial research papers (1500-1700 words). Fulfills MFA requirement. 4.23.20 2 729 • Forms of Nonfiction • W 1:00-3:45 • José Orduña Criticism in crisis: social criticism in times of acute disintegration In a 1987 interview, Margaret Thatcher famously (or infamously) declared that “there is no such thing as society,” only “individual men and women and … families.” Her declaration, and her rule, along with the rule of her US counterpart Ronald Reagan, served to consolidate the neoliberal political project, one that sought to hollow out the social safety net and used the rhetoric of personal responsibility and choice to blame individuals for their immiseration under capitalism. In this class, we’ll read literature that engages in social criticism, that is, criticism that presupposes the existence of something called society—an organizing idea that might mean something like the mutual influence and indebtedness we bring into being through our interactions—and situates its interrogations in the interconnected web of social, political, economic, and cultural relations. Writers that we’ll read in this class grapple with: the necessity (?) of cruelty and brutality in art, the political economy of playing and watching soccer, what is might mean for artworks to be embedded in art institutions under global capitalism, the ways US policy in Latin America comes to bear upon people’s lives, how decades of indigenous resistance gave shape to the #NoDAPL movement, etc… This class will primarily be lecture and discussion-based, but will include some short writing assignments, and will culminate with the writing of a piece of social criticism. Some of the authors and texts we’ll read include: Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others Maggie Nelson – The Art of Cruelty Hito Steyerl – Duty Free Art John Berger – Ways of Seeing Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth Eduardo Galeano – Soccer in Sun and Shadow Roberto Lovato - Unforgetting Nick Estes – Our History Is the Future Debbie Nathan – Women and Other Aliens Fulfills MFA requirement. 738 • Studies in Modern British Literature: Modernist Women Writers • Th 1:00-3:45 • Beth Rosenberg This course will look at the transatlantic network of modernist women writers from 1900- 1945. Readings will include first-generation writers Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Stevie Smith, Nella Larsen, Zora Neal Hurston, as well as second-generation modernists Muriel Spark, Nancy Mitford, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. The course will be supplemented with readings on modernism and feminist theory and also introduce students to digital resources, search engines, and websites. Fulfills the MA post-1800 requirement. 4.23.20 3 743 • Studies in Later American Literature: U.S. Literary Naturalism • T 1:00-3:45 • Gary Totten US literary naturalism was an aesthetic movement prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that attempted to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment in an amoral and indifferent universe. Characters in naturalistic works often struggle to retain a veneer of civilization despite external forces that promote their more primal instincts. Survival, determinism, and violence become key themes in naturalism. In the class, we will examine naturalism as a US literary phenomenon, and we will also explore how similar naturalistic themes and literary strategies animate the short stories and novels of some later twentieth- and twenty-first-century US writers.